Gapingvoid blogger Hugh Macleod worked with U.K. wine brand Stormhoek to use blogging as a means to increase sales. It worked. Big time, doubling sales in less than 12 months. The increases didn't come from the hundred or so bottles he sent out to U.K. bloggers who might blog about it and get a few of their friends to buy a bottle. Surely, they did drink the wine and did blog about it but the big increase in sales came from what Macleod calls The Porous Membrane, the wall between internal brand conversations and external consumer conversations.

Macleod posits blogs are a good way to make things happen indirectly and that they are disruptive to the status quo. To double sales inside of a year can't possiblely come from a few more people drinking a couple of bottles of wine. It can, however, come from a vastly improved internal attitude and sales process. The simple fact that the wine was out there and was being blogged about became part of the story telling sales process. As the sales force went out to supermarket buyers and importers, there was a new, different and exciting story to tell. Additionally, a retail outlet is far more likely to take on an increased inventory if it knows the product is getting talked about. The mindset is that if they're talking, they're more likely to buy. That's exactly what happened.

Within the span of two days, we saw two of your movies, Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and A Cinderella Story. (Don't worry, we're not stalking you. There's two kids here to entertain) Clearly, these are two very different movies. Clearly, you look very different in each. Clearly, you look far better in A Cinderella Story. What are you and every other young Hollywood celeb thinking when you choose to loose so much weight you end up looking a collection of bones with skin colored rubber stretched over them? You do know you look really bad, don't you? Mary Kate and Lindsay have managed to return from skeletal oblivion and we know you can too. Grab some pizza. Grab some McDonald's. Grab anything with more than 100 calories.

It's true the camera adds ten pounds but when you're 20-30 pounds underweight, even the camera can't help. For some reason, you seem to think you look better as a skeleton and, perhaps, feel guys will find you more attractive. You are wrong. Very wrong. There are these things called curves. You've heard of them. Those things that stick out behind you and in front of you. If, for some reason, you can't seem to remember what curves are, check out Scarlett Johanson. Or Jennifer Love Hewitt. Or Jessica Simpson. Or Jessica Alba. Or Angelina Jole. Or Katherine Heigl. Or Denise Richards. Or Michelle Trachtenberg. Or Mandy Moore. Or Amanda Bynes. Or Anne Hathaway. Or Joanna Levesque (Jojo). Or Elisha Cuthbert. Or Lacey Chabert. Or Jewel. Or Jessica Biel. Or Alexa Davalos. Or Amanda Righetti. Or Chyler Leigh. Or Rachel Nichols. Or Charlotte Church. Or Keeley. Or Nikki Cox. Or Mandy Amano. See? Get it? Now go get your curves back, Hilary. For the sake of your health and your career and your fans.

UPDATE: Not that Hilary reads Adrants as many of the commenters seem to believe, but if she does, this article was meant, as many of the commenters do not seem to believe, to be helpful. To be supportive. To be well intentioned. While jarringly blunt, all we're saying is be careful of the Hollywood machine. While Hilary, who's been in the machine for years, knows full well what the machine can do, an unsolicited kick in the ass from the outside world might be worth paying attention to.

The Wall Street Journal reports MTV's VH1 will, on January 13, launch "Web Junk 20," a show featuring video clips found on MTV-owned iFilm. MTV hopes the show will drive viewers to the company's online channel, Vspot. Unfortunately, as with other MTV online efforts, Vspot does not work with Firefox and visitors using that browser are met with "We're Sorry. PC Users with Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox: you need to run Internet Explorer to use VSpot." Idiots. Those most likely to be interested in Vspot content have a clue and those who have a clue use Forefox, not IE. Please get a clue, MTV and screw your deal with Microsoft.

To help economic development in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, city officials have, after asking for relief from corporate sponsors, has signed a deal with media buying club, MediaBuys to seek out corporate involvement for Mardi Gras in February of 2006. The deal is in reaction to a December 7 Wall Street Journal article stating the City of New Orleans was asking corporation to pay $2 million to sponsor Mardi Gras. MediaBuys will solicit "Official Presenting Sponsors" and help the city find additional funding from "Corporate Supporters" willing to collectively pay for a major Mardi Gras advertising support campaign.

Claiming Intel's marketing needed a swift kick in the ass, American Technology Research Analyst Doug Freeman, commenting on Intel's decision to change its tagline from "Intel Inside" to "Leap Ahead" in support of the company's expansion beyond computers, said, "That they're going to focus on 'Leap Ahead' makes me think about the technology. Not, 'buy me because I'm inside,' but 'buy me because I'm doing something unique.'" Apart from the fact that sounds like boneheaded boardroom brand blather, the change is beyond stupid. It's illogical and nonsensical. Intel chips ARE inside. That's the whole point. It's an easily understood, straight forward way of saying a product is better because it has an Intel chip inside. "Leap Ahead" is meaningless. Oh sure, there's that whole squishy, "we're doing all these cool things to help you move ahead and beyond the competition" but that could be applied to any company. It's not unique enough to set Intel apart from, say, the brand of wires used inside a device.

While some marketers would certainly explode with glee if every human being on the planet wore the brand's logo somewhere on their body but we just can't understand why any sane human would affix logoed fingernails to their fingers. Of course, we can't understand headvertising, assvertsing, babyvertising, voicevertising, cleavagevertising, bellyvertising or boobvertising either.

OK, wait a minute. Of course we can understand it all. Sorry. It must be this slower than death holiday news week rotting our brain. There's always plenty of money-hungry fools around to add to this list of marketing stunts. That and the fact the entire ad industry is in the middle of some sort of knee jerk reaction to all the "death of the :30/traditional advertising" woe that's been spinning around since marketers woke up and realized, oops, there's these ad skipping things called DVRs, iPods, pop up blockers, bit torrent TV, pirate radio and file sharing which they wish had never existed. Now advertising is...um...hard work when it was just supposed to be all about the parties and the three martini lunches.

How we got from someone's logoed fingernails to martinis we do not know but it passed some time on a slow Friday at the end of a slow holiday week. See you next year.

Well we've sat around long enough debating whether or not to launch a podcast and, as is usually the case around here, we need a swift kick in the ass to get moving on just about everything. That swift kick came from Joe Jaffe, founder and co-host of Across the Sound, a podcast about new marketing, media and PR. Since his co-host, Steve Rubel has moved on, Joe has invited a few ad industry folks - UnderScore Marketing President Tom Hespos, The M-Show host John Wall, Carat Fusion Business Development Director John Durham and us...us being Adrants Founder Steve Hall - to guest host the show. Our appearance should air in the second week of January.

It's not a permanent gig but it will be our first foray into another form of self expression. Since we seem to have so much to say here, another channel through which to shovel our babble might be a good thing. Or, it could be a disaster and we'll go down publicly as a blubbering idiot with a serious case of verbal diarrhea. But, either way, it should be great entertainment for you so subscribe to Across the Sound now so you don't miss one minute of our rise to podcast fame or decline into podcast flame.

Not that there's really any news this week nor any real reason to actually be working this week in the advertising industry, typically the time when upper management leaves the grunts behind to play pool and download music...uh...perform minuscule tasks referred to as work, but there are plenty of the usual 2005 wrap ups and 2006 pontification stories. One that caught our eye is written by Intelliseek CMO Pete Blackshaw.

Writing on ClickZ, Blackshaw offers up some personal insights he's experienced over the past year from buying more online (he has two newborn twins) to incessant bombardment of advertising, both consumer and B2B, into our lives particularly the insanity of pre-movie ads to cable company-based DVRs making television advertising irrelevant to increased consumption of online video to his experience with personal blogging that got him blogging about his babies and blogging to save a neighborhood pool.

Nothing cool lasts for very long in this world. Now that millions have made MySpace their home for just about everything, many worried the acquisition by News Corp would changed things. Not so promised MySpace founders but alas they have. Many MySpace members link to videos on YouTube and, apparently, News Corp-owned MySpace doesn't like the practice. According to the Blog Herald, MySpace has been deleting any and all reference to YouTube from profiles. There's even a MySpace group fighting the censorship.

MySpace came out of nowhere as the single most popular place to go for...well...anything. It can disappear just as quickly and be replaced by another.